Introduction

Although XINA is very flexible and can be configured to meet almost any data organization requirements, we have defined standard organization principles for common use cases with pre-built front end tooling. These are not hard limitations, just recommendations based on past experience, performance benchmarks, and cost/benefit analysis. Additionally, by adhering to these standards projects can quickly leverage built-in XINA front end tools and data processing pipelines, as well as first class API actions for interacting with data in complex ways. We call this collection of standards structured data standards, or structs.

Data Models

The primary organizational concept of the struct system is the data model. Abstractly, a data model (or simply model) is defined as having a set of synchronously relevant data. For example, a project might have a flight model, ETU model, etc. Models store data in independent databases, and multiple models may be importing data in parallel.

Broadly we use time as the primary method to organize and synchronize data within a model. In XINA this is represented as an 8-byte unsigned integer Unix time with microsecond precision. We use Unix time because it is:

• Widely and consistently supported
• Time zone independent
• Efficiently converted

Other time formats may be available for data export depending on project requirements.